Some Tips on Oracle FMW 11g Clustering: deployment and configuration

In this blog-posting, I share some first tips on Oracle FMW 11g (11.1.1.2/PS1) cluster-wide deployment and cluster configuration based on my first experiences with setting up such an environment.

Most tips come from these two documents:
- Enterprise Deployment Guide for Oracle SOA Suite
- Oracle FMW 11g High-Availability Guide


Cluster-wide deployment tips

• More info on SCA deployment with Ant can be found through my previous posting
  
• Deploy a composite to a specific node of the cluster: the deployment coordinator in the Oracle FMW 11g cluster infrastucture will take care of the correct propagation to all the other nodes or rollback in case of a failure on a specific node. For more info on this have a look here.
  
• Set up Oracle Coherence for unicast communication during cluster-wide deployments. Have a look here for more details.
  

Configuration tips

• Make sure you set the value of the serverURL and the callbackServerURL to the front-end SOA cluster location. In most cases this will be the endpint of the front-end loadbalancer. If you have set the SOA Cluster Front-End URL in the Oracle Weblogic Server Administration Console (location: Clusters -> ) its value will be used for the serverURL and callbackServerURL.
  Note: For unclear reasons, I solved cluster-wide deployment problems by setting the server- and callbackServerURL.
  
• You can apply configuration changes to any specific node in the Oracle FMW 11g SOA cluster. Oracle WebLogic Clusters takes care of automatic configuration synchronization across all the nodes of the cluster.
  

I hope to share more tips here in the near future.